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Maybe I'm just not the target market for this kind of device, but I am always left scratching my head on the value proposition of something like this.

For roughly the same price, I could build a micro-ATX rig with twice (or more) the SATA ports, a higher-power CPU, optical drive capability, and more USB/USB3 ports. Plus, the custom build could also be an additional home PC, from which you could run a Plex server, and/or host your mySQL database for XBMC.

I always find myself reading AT reviews on NAS boxes with the idea that I might want one. Then I look at the price and compare to the functionality of my current W8.1-based home server and the two aren't even in the same league.

Power consumption can't be it (my W8.1-based home server consumes 31W at long idle).

Network throughput can't be it (I get 900Mbps over my home network moving files between PCs).

I'm at the other end of the spectrum myself: I have a pile more data, well into the 6/12disk segment, and at the price, dropping a microATX Rangeley (Avoton with more extensive crypto engine) into a backblaze pod looks like a much nicer proposition.Reply

Completely agreed. $370 for a 2 disk setup seems absolutely absurd unless you are absolutely positive you won't need more than 3 or 4TB of space over the life of the device, and even then its hard to fathom. You can build a custom PC for that much, put a 4-in-3 hotswap bay in, and have double the hot swap space, plus future expansion options. These devices just seem so limited I cant comprehend why you'd botherReply

I also don't understand. I want something other than ext4 as well. If I'm going to store lots of data long-term I want reliability to be the name of the game. I ended up building a server around a Xeon E3 with ECC memory and 6x drives. Then installing FreeBSD on it with the storage drives running ZFS. It cost similar to a midrange Synology box, but it is better in every way.

I think these are for people for which the hassle of setting up and building is significant. They just want to plug it in, flick some switches on the web interface, and easily store data on the network. For that I can certainly see value, it just isn't for me.Reply

The number of people that want that idiot proof NAS experience might outnumber the amount of enthusiasts that will roll their own. I don't have either, still seems unnecessary with just two PC in the house, but I know plenty of non enthusiasts and family guys that have bought a NAS like this and would never or could never go DIY. Seems like beating a dead horse to argue the value if you're an enthusiast, it's there for those that aren't or don't wanna bother just like HP & DELL desktops were for ages...Reply

I bought one because it is easy to setup and near silent in operation and has been designed for its purpose. I previously had another NAS made by Zxyel which was a total hassle to setup and use by comparison. I struggled to justify the cost of this box initially, but I have been blown away by how user friendly Synology's DSM OS and mobile apps are and being able to easily run Drupal sites on it for internal testing is great, as is being able to backup all the Macs in the house to the time machine function. Naturally, you could build your own box, but I've done that before and it costs alot more for decent components, the case will likely be bigger and it will be noisier and it takes ages to configure just right. I actually don't use the media features I just bought it to play with them as I have a mac mini hooked up to the TV for XBMC duties but I've ended up using far more of the features than I'd anticipated, not just for file shares. The only reason I might build a physical server would be to also run AD, Exchange and SharePoint VMs for development and while it would be more capable, it would also be more hassle to maintain and more costly to build (RAM and processing requirements) and most of that can be done in Azure now. The box is really user friendly and to be honest these days, that's what I want rather than spending days of my expensive time assembling a server.Reply

The main advantage of small soho NASes is size and idiot proofing. You might not care about having another tower case sitting in your network closet, geek cave; but Joe Mundane would much rather have a really small box than a big one and these sort of systems can offer much better performance than a USB drive hung off a router. They also require much less skill to configure and operate than a full fledged server PC.Reply

This. These things look bad from a financial aspect if you're thinking of purchasing one as an individual where you undervalue your time.. But in terms of a business, you can burn through $370 in an hour, if not a few minutes. You can spend 5 minutes to buy this and 10 minutes to set it up when it arrives and get it up and running. Or you can spend an hour picking out and ordering the parts for a custom box, then spend an hour assembling it, then 2 more hours installing software, setting it up, and testing it. Usually at that point a business has burned more money on labor than it would've spent on this one-stop solution.

Case in point, one example where it makes sense as an individual is if I want to set up my parents with a NAS. I don't want to remotely troubleshoot it and have to babysit them through fixes every time something goes wrong. I want it to be dirt simple to set up, and have a proven track record of reliability without continuous monitoring and management. The time it saves me from having to fix or tweak it at my parents' house can easily be worth $370 to me.

The custom box solution is only cheaper if you put little or no value on your time. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I <i>enjoy</i> tweaking with and trying out new things on my custom NAS. I just wouldn't enjoy it if I had to do it remotely at my parents' house every time they have a weird problem they can't fully explain to me, or if I were paying someone $30/hr to do it.)Reply

I have the ability to build a seriously nice HP Microserver with encryption, trascoding streaming, and all that good stuff, too - and it'd cost the same, more or less, as one of these devices, if you don't include my time at chargable rates. I'm a multidisciplanary IT admin/troubleshooter - I'm the sort of person who can singlehandedly build an entire office infrastructure including GPO'd domain (or Puppet'd Linux environment) from scratch given the funding and a few days of time. So I'm not niave about this.

But after a ten hour day of fixing servers and workstations, I wasn't in the mood to build one on any given night of the week or weekend, so just bought the DS214+

Admittadly, no transcoding (the Play wasn't available at the time, and the DS713+ was a bit much for my needs and budget), but handily, Chromecast and VideoStream do that nicely using my laptop as a proxy.

Does everything I need to, very nicely, with absolutely sod all maintenance or tweeking required, it'll happily WOL and sleep, can talk to UPS/Wireless/Bluetooth dongles if you get the right ones, and has enough commonality with ARM Linux (it's Debian on ARM) to have a good developer pool for unapproved apps. My next project is to set up Asterix on it and practise with VOIP, too see if I can help reduce the office phone bill.

You're paying for the convenience, the simplicity and the support (that you'll rarely need with this class of device); I'm finding more and more cases where these devices are 'good enough' for a lot of SOHO and small SMB clients, and also power users such as ourselves. The nice thing about Synos range is that they scale up to monster, gazillion disk, 10GBe rackmount devices, too - all with the same interface; very handy for support purposes.

Consumer NAS devices are at the stage where they can, in many cases, replace a light use Windows/Linux whitebox/OEM server for a lot of people. Simple as that. They aren't suitable for everything, but they are suitable for a hell of a lot.

I'm not paid by Synology (or anyone in that respect) but when I find a device or service I think is worth kudos, I'll wax on about it happily. The Syno gear is worth investigating IMHO, it's a cut above the Netgear/WD/QNAP stuff, and unless you require device specific functionality (realtime replication between boxes like what the netgears do) I'd go for Syno stuff every time these days.Reply

I set up a custom RAID10 NAS at work and it's configured to run SMART tests on the drives, monitor temperatures of the drives etc and send email alerts if there are problems. Took some time to set up but doesn't need any babysitting. Why would it? It's been running year after year. Earlier this year it sent email alerts when the server room air conditioner broke down and the drives started to get warm. Probably the only machine in the entire server room that sends out such alerts ;), I set it up because the crappy WD NASes others set up were slow and kept dying or hanging.Reply

For me it's hardware RAID and RAID expansion options. FreeNAS OS can help you build a custom NAS yourself, but cannot provide RAID expansion sadly enough.That's if you want RAID 5, 6 and the likes and have the option to add/exchange disks with different capacity etc.. But if you just want RAID 1 and stick to it, then you're probably better off with a micro-ATX rig and software RAID like you suggest.Reply

All in all, I have been completely sold on ZFS, and have no plans to use anything else for a NAS or any other form of critical storage until btrfs (a GPL-compliant and even more powerful successor to ZFS) gets a stable release. Oh, and personally I wouldn't run FreeNAS: I'd run bare FreeBSD and set it up manually.

Gah... most of my comment about ZFS got nuked.... And I can't be bothered to retype in all out, so here's the tl;dr edition (read the arstechnica article I linked for more detailed info):

Compared to HW RAID controllers:- RAID5/6: ZFS has RAIDZ1/2/3, for 1, 2 or 3 disks worth of redundancy, equivalent to RAID5/6/there is no equivalent to RAIDZ3 to my knowledge

- Add/exchange disks with different capacity: Done in ZFS by swapping each disk in a vdev (ZFS term more or less equivalent to arrays), then "resilvering" once all is done to increase it's size.

Features no HW RAID controller has (to my knowledge):- Copy-on-Write (CoW): each update to a file is written as the difference to the original file. This allows for self-healing (damaged blocks are recovered using checksums and old data to regenerate current data) and snapshots (snapshots of the FS is a a state a a point in time). Snapshots make incremental backups trivial. In fact, quite a lot of people use snapshots to back up production databases instead of doing a traditional dump the DB to disk method.

All in all, I have been completely sold on ZFS, and have no plans to use anything else for a NAS or any other form of critical storage until btrfs (a GPL-compliant and even more powerful successor to ZFS) gets a stable release. Oh, and personally I wouldn't run FreeNAS: I'd run bare FreeBSD and set it up manually.

I've been using 2-drive NAS appliances (first Netgear and then Synology) for probably 6 or 7 years now. I've got above-average technical acumen, but with two little kids and a busy job, I don't have enough hours in the day right now to worry about reliable storage. These things are small enough to sit on a bookshelf, they run quietly with low power, and a red light starts flashing and a buzzer sounds when there's a problem. About a year ago, one of the drives in my RAID-1 died. I swapped in a spare and never missed a beat. It would have been divorce court for me if our 20,000 family photos went down the drain. Yes, I still run regular backups (again, one push of a button on the front panel with an external drive plugged in), but it's a huge relief knowing that the odds are low of drive failure taking down our storage system. I never get support calls from home asking why the storage system is offline.

Having said all that, I just bought a $250 Dell mini tower server, and I plan to move to it as our storage array. I'll probably keep the Synology and set up automated backup. I'm now trying to find space in the wiring closet for the Dell, and it's not an 'appliance' like these NAS units are.

Basically, the NAS took away all of the thinking with regard to redundant, networked storage, and that allowed me to stop procrastinating and get everything centralized with RAID and backup. I've got a lot of hobbies, but our primary storage array shouldn't be one of them.

We do only need about 2 TB of storage, so we're probably the ideal customer for a unit like this.Reply

Couldn't agree more. I picked up a very nice rackable case a while back, dropped a Gigabyte mATX board in with a dual core Phenom processor, a few GB of ram, and 5 WD drives with FreeNAS. With the exception of one RMA'd drive which failed after about 6 months, it's been absolutely rock solid for about 7 years now. Total cost on the entire build, including drives (5 x 2TB drives) was right around $800 (the drives alone were $600 at the time).

While I certainly do appreciate having an easy setup for this type of unit (plug, configure, play), the limitations are just too restrictive (ie: either 4TB with redundancy or 8TB without - which is simply NOT a real choice). Yes, I'm certainly an edge case when it comes to this type of thing, but looking at any 5-bay devices (which would be my personal minimum), you're easily into near four digit costs and that's NOT including a drive.Reply

I used to think like you guys till very recently. However, in addition to some of the points mentioned by other readers, there are certain aspects that only these NAS vendors provide:

1. Mobile app ecosystem - Creation of a mobile app (iOS / Android) which presents an easy and intuitive interface to your NAS's contents2. Operation of relay service to access your NAS content from an external network without port forwarding3. Automatic backup of data from mobile devices to the NAS4. In the case of DS214play, a hardware accelerated transcode engine behind the media server feature.

For a non-tech savvy consumer, or even for a person who knows the internal details, but doesn't want to spend time configuring or building a NAS, the units supplied by these NAS vendors make a good choice.Reply

I'll consider buying them when they use Copy-on-Write filesystems, and come in sizes greater than 16bays for under 6k (a fully-built backblaze pod for 45 drives comes in around the 3k mark). I value data integrity more than any convenience, and as of now (to my knowledge), a CoW FS is the best thing you can get.

If you are in contact with said companies, it would be nice if you could mention that to them... anyone who has encountered bit rot knows that RAID just isn't enough these days...Reply

Couldn't agree with you more Ganesh. I have a home built set up right now on an old tower. I've been running Plex/Cloud-backups for a while now, and the fact these standalone NAS boxes have native integration with little hassle is very attractive. In the future I will be buying a solution like this.Reply

Does Plex (read: Plex's modified version of FFMPEG) work with Evansport yet? Last I checked a month or so ago, it doesn't, which means you do not get hardware transcoding with this device (or any other Evansport-based NAS).Reply

As I mentioned in the review's Video Transcode section and also in the concluding remarks, Plex has never cared about hardware acceleration. So, yes, you are right - no HW transcode with Plex on any Evansport platform ; Only bet for hw transcode amongst NAS vendors is Synology's DSM -- just wish it was more stable :)Reply

Ah, apologies because I hadn't gotten to those sections yet when I made my comment. I don't know if it's necessarily an issue of PLEX not caring, but I assume that migrating to a new version of FFMPEG isn't a simple task (I read a post from an employee saying that they use a custom version). So, if I had to guess (note: I have no affiliation with PLEX; I just read the forums sometimes), I assume that they want to wait until there's a more pressing reason to upgrade the codec.

Although, I hope they upgrade it soon, because I've found some annoying crash-to-desktop issues with stylized subtitles in the Windows version of PLEX Home Theater. In one instance, not even Media Player Classic: Home Cinema could handle it, but in the other, it played fine.Reply

You spent time building your rig, right? How much do you value your time? $50/hr? $100/hr? I'm guessing between assembling your rig and configuring it the way you want, you probably spent 5+ hrs. If your time is worth anything of significance, then the cost of your set up far exceeds the cost of a NAS.

Additionally, all the features of the mobile app ecosystem are non-existent for a home setup.

A NAS is simply for people that want a easy data storage device that requires little/no time to setup, and offers a multitude of features for access to that data. It's NOT meant as a full blown server. It's a NAS. Even medium/large companies use them for those benefits of simplicity.Reply

bzontins - people are paying for a smaller, lower power, turn key solution. You can get close to the size with the HP Microserver, though until the Gen 8 the cpu performance was not much better than the athlons but with much higher power draws. Until sandy bridge, general purpose cpus were too power hungry. The use of HW acceleration for transcoding is a pretty nice feature of this model, and if that continues, could turn the tide.

turn key is worth a lot to many people, either because they don't know how to do it themselves, or because they don't want to. As the number of apps increased for these boxes, the need for running solaris or linux is somewhat diminished. Reply

I hear ya. I like the theory of trading money to save myself time, except for stuff like this, I always end up doing it myself. I've even purchased cheap two drive NASs (ZyXel NSA 320) and then gone to the trouble of running debian on them.

I just bought a mini-ITX Kabini board to build a new, faster NAS. I wish their were better options on compact 2 & 4 drive cases and low power PSUs. I prefer having two devices in different parts of the house, with one backing up the other, and I don't want to stuff a big video card in it, so the bigger cases are overkill.Reply

I'm a bit late to the party here but I'll stick my nose in anyway. I've spent many years building countless machines of all shapes and sizes, I'm a programmer by trade, and I'd even go so far as to say I enjoy working with complex networks. But you couldn't pay me the world to change my Synology for any other NAS. Certainly the open source stuff I've looked at pales in comparison to the DSM.

If the hardware specs are all you're weighing up then you're missing the point. Fully 50% of what your spending your money on when you buy a Synology is the OS and the apps that come with it. It's just incredible. You really just have to sit down and use one to see how simple, fully featured, and stable they are.

I guess the bottom line for me though (and this may sound a little simplistic), is that they just work. The last thing I want to do when I get home at night is start messing around with a server, and I've never had a single issue in the 6~7 years I've been using Synology's products.

I've also convinced quite a lot of friends and colleagues of their virtues and not one has been the least bit disappointed about buying one.

I'm currently on my 2nd Synology and am considering moving to the 214Play, solely because I want x86 to run some bits on, but my 212+ is a shiner as well!Reply

These are made not for idiot proofing, they are made to just work. I've had mine sitting in a spare room for 2 years and has never needed to even go look at it. (4 unit 12TB) data for media.

It streams to My TV from XBMC/Couchpotato/SABnsbd anything I throw at it, stores movies/music/etc without a hickup.

Many businesses also have these for ease of use.

The only difference a custom one offers is just to say you made it, it can't do anymore really than these units can. Or if it can, its just something that caters to YOU and not really other people. You don't need tons of ram for these system to get jobs done (I had a WHS original with only 512megs did all what this can do), and CPU can handle it just fine.Reply

Exactly.I don't own a NAS yet, but plan to buy a Synology 4b NAS (probably DS414). I'm a very tech savvy person and have built my own PCs since years - but I just want a NAS that works, that I have to setup once in a matter of minutes and never (or rarely) worry again. I don't want to waste any more free time on these thingsReply

I have a much larger version. Reasons I chose a NAS device rather than building my own:-8 disks in pretty much the same space as it would take to store 8 hdds side by side on their own-My time is worth more than the cost difference. I can turn features on with a click rather than installing and configuring packages.-In the event of a failure I don't want to have to set it all up again. I don't want to cause a failure accidentally or some update to screw things up. I can't afford downtime.-Fewer possible points of failure. The hardware is much simpler and streamlined.Reply

I think when my DS214+ needs replacing (or when I find £500 down the back of the couch, etc) one of the chunkier, VMware/citrix/HyperV certified units will be next - I can then justify building another VM server and using that as a small SAN type thingy.

I can use the DS214 as an iSCSI host, but it's not really quick enough over a single GbE link, and I don't have trunking/aggregating capable switch to boost performance...

Thanks for the discussion, it's really helped me to understand the benefit of a unit like this (mostly time/simplicity). Which are perfectly good reasons to go that route.

What I was concerned about was that I was missing some other benefit of a NAS other than time/ease. It doesn't appear to be the case.

As someone who needs four drives + optical (ripping) + SSD (OS), I have always just leaned toward rolling my own. I love the ability to use TeamViewer to remote into my PC and manage things. Plex runs great. I keep AirSync native on it to sync my music collection to my Android devices over WiFi. In order to manage my media, it's great to be able to run Media Companion on it.

I guess for all my needs, if I got one of these NAS boxes I would still need a full-time PC to manage my media and streaming needs. Thus, it makes sense to take the time and effort to build my own.

I got an incredible deal on a Dell T20 Server: $199 with a Haswell processor and 4GB of RAM to start. The expansion abilities are nice, to include up to 6 drives (13TB total space). Granted, I could have built my own, but getting an actual server with a modern processor for $199 can't be beat. Reply

I must be the idiot then. About 3 years ago I build a small tower using a AMD Athlon X2 quad-core CPU, 16GB ECC RAM, and 4x 1TB drives running FreeNAS7 in a ZFS2 configuration. Performance through SAMBA was simply abysmal. Earlier this year I bought the DS214play and it just works the way I want it to. I run 2x 4TB drives in RAID1 using the old 4x 1TB drives as a backup to the NAS. I love that it's a small, silent box that sits on an IKEA Expedit shelf. it hides behind a photograph. Performance through SAMBA is much better than what I experienced before. Setup and Web access is indeed idiot proof. And most of all I feel I have great support (and apps) behind the product. I frankly got tired of doing the "nerd" solution. I just wanted something small, silent, supported, and highly functional. The DS214play does this for me.Reply

Poor samba performance 3 years ago points to problems around the SMB1->2 migration, particularly when we're talking about freenas7. MS made it a moving target. Eventually solved. But you're cheating a bit by comparing it to 3 years later technology. If you have rebuilt with a more recent freenas release, or gone to solaris, you'd have also seen better samba performance. Reply

I know this is somewhat tangential to the main review, but since you mention Photo Station, one important thing to note is that it does not properly support photos in non-sRGB color spaces (including AdobeRGB which is very common in mid-to-high end cameras). These photos all end up looking muddy and washed out in Photo Station, since the color space is discarded during processing.Reply

One place that I also found it interesting that Synology didn't employ the transcoding feature of the SoC was with Surveillance Station, even in the latest SS6.3 Beta. The number of cameras and features the DS214play supported (requiring transcoding) was below what I'd expect compared to even the DS214. [http://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare_pro...]Reply

How would hooking one of these up to the router and then (best case conditions in theory) streaming via powerline to an HTPC for transcoding work? Would a DS214se work just as well since the transcoding is taking place on the HTPC, not the NAS?Reply

Hii was thinking to buy the Synology DS-214+ or DS214Play and to use it with the raspberry Pi to watch movies on TV. I d like to watch also movies on 2 different samsung galaxy tab 2 through DS Video . So which is the best ? DS-214+ or DS214Play ?